Putting a Child on a Path to Lifelong Learning

“Can you hear me?”“
“Can you go on mute please?”
The cooker whistle goes off
The calls drops; connects back again

This is the everyday of online and homebased learning. Behind the scenes, we know that the mother has wrapped up house work, set up learning materials for the day, moved the children out of bed, and managed to prop them up in front of the screen. This is a typical day in a household that is currently supporting a student to learn from home, in rural Cuddalore.

In response to schools shutting down in the pandemic since March 2020, Kanavu started a home-based learning program ‘Kathir’ with a vision to ensure that continued learning opportunities are available for as many children as possible. Simple learning tasks are designed and sent to parents through WhatsApp.

Teachers support parents and students with calls and follow up messages sharing feedback on students’ work. Very quickly, it emerged to us clearly that ‘parents as partners’ was a key to moving forward on home-based learning. What also shone through was that we can’t aspire to replicate a classroom learning experience at home.

Possibilities Opened up at Home

At Kanavu, we work with a vision that one’s circumstances shouldn’t dictate one’s destiny. This pointed us to possibilities that existed within the circumstances that our students from remote villages were in. Sea shells and stones around the home turned into math kits, open spaces around homes with sand became sand pits to practice writing alphabets, cloth bags and objects around the home became mystery bags to build stereognostic sense in children.

Activities pushed children to have conversations with parents to create a family tree or an emotion map of how the family was feeling through the pandemic.

A task like this provides an opportunity for the child to pick up and practice a variety of skills like asking questions, labelling emotions, organizing information and presenting it clearly. Learning was designed to maximize possibilities of resources and people that were at home.

No external help or training but a successful partnership between the teacher and the parents and their investment ensured the learning continuity of this child.

What’s Happening Beyond Pencil and Paper?

The attempt to not ‘replicate’ what happens in the classroom, but to go beyond that and explore the true meaning of education – which is to assist self-discovery, led us to think of what happens beyond pencil and paper. Understanding child development at different ages was a great starting point to design activities that promote holistic learning for a child. So, what is happening across different age groups of children?

The Kindergarteners

The tiniest of all, most of these children haven’t been to school yet. Learning is best facilitated by the primary caregiver for children in this age group. We chose to create content for parents and not for students. Videos are designed for parents to set up activities for students to explore concepts like light, heavy, sinking and floating. Children go through a series of activities to promote growth across the domains of cognition, linguistic abilities and logic. From sorting colors and counting objects at home, simple activities are designed keeping in mind what could happen at home.

Parents themselves enjoy activities like blindfolding their child, sharing a spoonful of food item with a variety of tastes, and the child guessing the food item and the taste. As educators, we also see how activities like these are so much better, accessible and holistic when done at home. It nurtures the relationship between the child and the parent, in a new context of learning about the world with their primary caregivers.

The Primary Grades

This is an age group that is curious, needs guided explorations and are semi-accessing the phone, watching videos themselves, weaning off parental support. Content is designed for children to explore materials around them as art materials, as props for little dramas they record and send.

Concepts such as mixtures are taught by children making lemon juice, with an invitation to share it with loved ones. With upper primary and secondary grades, homebased learning has opened up an opportunity to build awareness of themselves, through targeted ‘social and emotional learning’ reflection questions.

The online paradigm has pushed students to articulate their thoughts – sharing it as audio notes or written pieces. We have teachers share how they are seeing new facets of students – a rather shy child in school is the first one to finish the tasks; a child who struggles with written work is a star across tasks involving audio notes.

The Secondary Grades

These, we observe, are students who have been the hardest to reach and have online learning capture their imagination. Preadolescents and adolescents have accessed content through videos – teachers supporting them to get into a rhythm and routine. Students in these groups have been the most vocal about expressing resistance to learning from home.

Story time is emerging as a favourite for upper primary students – facilitated by an external educator who brings in a great deal of experience in literacy.

Parents have struggled to keep students motivated. This group of students have needed a lot of one-on-one talk time to problem solve for home-based learning. With systemic pressures of syllabus completion, exams and bridging the learning gap that exists, moving from paper and pencil to reallife learning has been challenging.

What it has looked like, is holding circle time discussing about their dreams and aspirations for the future, and holding synchronous Zoom meetings that help students to come together and meet their teachers and peers. One-on-one interactions have strengthened bonds between teachers and children. These have enabled the teacher to understand barriers that are holding the child back.

We observe teachers design specific skill-based worksheets or work with parents to support the child to learn. Differentiation to bridge a learning gap in higher grades is a huge challenge that this current manner of learning is paving the way for. Google forms have supported differentiated literacy assessments splitting students by levels and assessing growth on the same. Individual calls for reading fluency has been supporting growth, along reading fluency levels.

We Teach; But What Are They Learning?

This is a classic question that all educators ask themselves – children learn over and above what is being taught and how do we capture what a child is learning? The online paradigm has created opportunities for students to share their learning through photographs of articulated thoughts, audio notes, sharing videos and completed online worksheets or forms.

In our experience, we found that worksheets were too simplistic a tool to assess learning in an online paradigm. This has pushed us and our team of teachers to design different ways to capture what the child has learnt. Getting students to create process videos for how an experiment is done, for instance, has been a great way for us to assess what the child has understood, and if the concept is clear for her. Building simple rubrics has helped teachers in evaluations.

When we taught simple rhythms using materials at home to make music, we had an opportunity to enjoy the music made, while also looking for a sense of rhythm in children and a bit of the math in it. Bringing a variety of tools like sharing reading assessments over WhatsApp, teachers doing one-onone calls to listen to students reading, has improved accuracy of data for languages.

What Technology Has Enabled

What started as asynchronous learning (where material is sent to the student and they learn at a time that is convenient for them) only, today has moved to a blended learning experience of synchronous (timed online classes over Zoom) and asynchronous learning packets. Younger children attend online Zoom meetings where their teachers are facilitating phonics lessons.

The online paradigm has created opportunities for students to share their learning through photographs of articulated thoughts, audio notes, sharing videos and completed online worksheets or forms.

Assisted by parents, who themselves are learning to operate a smartphone for the first time, this has been a huge step forward in creating a connection between teachers and students. Parents also set up learning materials like flash cards and sand boards for students to access during classes. Story time is emerging as a favourite for upper primary students – facilitated by an external educator who brings in a great deal of experience in literacy.

This is yet another window of opportunity that technology has opened for us – students in remote villages are able to access readalouds and an opportunity to critically engage with stories. This is also serving as a model for teachers who are on the call, who are picking up pedagogic practices for teaching literacy. Technology has also opened up gamified learning, opportunities for quizzes and online events to open up for children in rural areas.

We hear stories about a parent choosing to enable learning for five other students in the same village. Similarly, we see teachers inviting children home to access technology, ensuring learning continuity for them.

Where Technology is a Barrier

Ensuring a student learns continuously despite the pandemic needs more than technological fixes. It needs invested parents, teachers to support consistently, families to prioritize recharge, and infrastructure support like network and electricity for devices to be charged. Homes with more than one child studying makes it a question of which child’s learning is prioritized at any given point of time.

It is a struggle for all these factors to be in favour of the child and to ensure that there are enough learning opportunities every day. Students with no access to a device or without network coverage, will be at a very different place when school reopens. Keeping them motivated to come back to school and not drop out is a huge challenge for teachers who are in touch with them through regular phone calls.

Realizing the Purpose of Education

It was a day when teachers were at school setting up some resources for the new academic year. This is when a couple walked into the school office and asked to meet the teacher. They’d brought their phone along.

Ganga Miss, the class teacher, shares that this student was unable to join Zoom classes despite having a phone because there was an issue with its mic. She, who herself was new to handling technology, asked the parent to bring the phone to school. Within a matter of half an hour, after troubleshooting with various settings, the team of teachers solved the software issue. The parents happily returned and the child continues to engage in classes henceforth.

No external help or training but a successful partnership between teachers and parents, and their investment, ensured the learning continuity of this child. Even for students who have access to a device, who watch videos and access tasks, we see that learning happens in the interactions between the parents and the child and between the latter and the teachers.

One cannot imagine that learning happens when a child watches a video or completes a worksheet based on seeing a video. Technology enables learning through information transfer. This can’t be confused with technology becoming the primary site of learning. Depth in learning happens when it is facilitated with thought.

The challenge lies in designing opportunities for interactions to be meaningful, enriching and leaving the participants with renewed energy to do more of this, in the remote paradigm. In doing this, we are able to fulfil the purpose of education – which is to put children on the path of being lifelong learners, irrespective of their circumstances.